@Woodpeck - thank you for your reply.

You’re right that not everyone on the mailing lists has to be either engaging in abusive behaviour, or to be a direct recipient of it. I think it’s getting to a point, however, where the level of vitriol on the lists is extremely discouraging for everyone, even if they’re not a current victim. The current climate on the OSM lists is, I believe, corrosive to all.

A very recent example; will people express a belief on list A, when they could get abused for it there, or on list B? What’s the use of 3rd party services if you’re going to get harassed about your thoughts on the OSM lists? There’s a chilling effect here that is damaging to everyone.

I think we’re seeing a really dangerous process of harassment and abuse travelling horizontally across mailing lists and other platforms; calling people out for having an opinion is bad enough, but moving this to other platforms and being confrontational there is only harassment. Shutting this sort of behaviour down should be a priority for the OSMF; doing so would not count as “censorship”.

I think racism is commonplace and insidious on the mailing lists I am a member of. As I’ve said, I don’t want to name names as I don’t think that’s appropriate. As I’ve also said, this isn’t the sort of racism I can grep out of conversations; I’m not here saying “there’s bad words on the lists”. A small number of mailing users will work hard to highlight differences between members, particularly along USA / Europe lines, and are subtlety, constantly, attempting to generate friction based on this issue of race.

I write this as a European living in my country of birth. That possibly wasn’t made clear by the location link in my original post. I should probably say that I speak to Americans, and my fellow Europeans, on a daily basis about matters unrelated to OSM, geography, maps, etc.

I have not touched on a CoC on this thread (I’d rather deal with one issue at a time; this week’s issue is identifying a problem), but I think this could be a useful point. I believe that mailing list moderation is good for dealing with the bad words I mentioned above, or obvious community rules: You can’t use offensive language, you can’t post on adult themes, you can’t try to sell your Honda Civic. However, you can adhere to these rules and still engage in racist behaviour, if you keep it to an insidious level, and if you do it so much that it just becomes part of the background of the community. I believe a CoC would set expectations, not moderator rules, which would help with the racism I believe is engaged in on a near daily basis.

I don’t like to say that I think the OSM lists are a harmful place, but as it stands I would not encourage people to join up.

@Glassman - Thank you for the replies and the Quartz link, fascinating reading.

@Nakaner - As I previously said, I don’t want to be getting into specifics as I believe people will be able to find these themselves. You’ve managed that yourself with an obvious example, but there’s plenty of more subtle (yet plenty offensive if you’re on the wrong end of it) emails sent recently. As for racism, it’s very present in an insidious manner on the mailing lists; I have previously emailed about this.

I am growing tired at the “different cultures” explanation for the negative behaviour seen on the mailing lists. This is an excuse that just doesn’t fly anymore, if it ever did at all. In my daily life I communicate with people from a diverse range of cultures, almost all of this has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap; I engage with a people from a variety of cultures on a daily basis for both professional and personal reasons. Abusive behaviour as part of my life with these people does not happen and would not be acceptable if it did. The “different cultures” excuse is offensive not only because it is obviously untrue, but also because it assumes that I have no little experience with cultures other than my own: You cannot explain other people’s abusive behaviour by claiming that I am naive.

This is great, thanks Paul,

I’ve completed the questions I missed before - apologies for being a little slow on them!

Cheers, Joseph

Thanks Dale and Mark for clearing that up - as you say Dale it’s better to get it dealt with now before any potential conflict.

I am pleased to hear that ARC has ok’d this - that’s the sort of forward thinking that I was really hoping the Board election process would involve.

I think it’d be great to have you on the Board.

Hi Dale,

Thanks for putting yourself forward. I really like what you’ve written above, but have a question - could a position on the HOT Board be viewed as a conflict of interest with your role as GIS Lead at ARC?

Best, Joseph

Hi Dale,

Thanks for putting yourself forward. I really like what you’ve written above, but have a question - could a position on the HOT Board be viewed as a conflict of interest with your role as GIS Lead at ARC?

Best, Joseph

Sorry, I misread your first post. *Rivers* don't seem to be named. Yes, I've just noticed that myself. I'd keep using the name tag, however, it's the correct one to use. No need to break the database to account for problems in the renderer.

Are you sure they're not being displayed? Have you cleared your browser cache? Streams are named in Mapnik: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.73885&lon=-1.24259&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF

Hi liftarn - that could also work well, and would likely be simpler to implement. Any development would include, I imagine, a number of play modes for testing.

Cheers, Joseph

Hi Sanderd17, apologies for the blog - it requires all comments to be moderated and I've been away from the Internet for much of the evening.

Yes, I'm sure there's lots of options you could think of for use only on bikes / when walking, etc. You could take the basic idea and spin out a load of different apps from it.

I'm not sure what would be needed to turn this idea into a reality, I was going to have a brief think and write another blog post. Please check back and get in contact if you would like to help out.

Cheers, Joseph

It's a good part of the world to get lost though! Myself and a couple of friends once walked from Busteni to Bran over the course of a couple of days. It was only about 5 years ago, but now I look at OSM and think that we could have navigated that distance using nothing more than our mobile phones. Would've made it easier ;)

Is working fine for me: Ubuntu 9.10, latest flash non-free and FF 3.5.7

Furthermore, remove the c flag and you'll see that I'm not out by a factor of three:

joseph@joseph-work:~$ grep -i 'Pub' united_kingdom_Eating_Drinking.gpx | sort | head
Pub:12 bar
Pub:13th Note Cafe
Pub:1802
Pub:1901 Bar & Bistro
Pub:26 Smithfield
Pub:2nd West
Pub:3's
Pub:3one7
Pub:3 Tuns
Pub:4 Aces

I see you've got your own statistics online now, I would recommend double checking them.

Cheers, Joseph

mannequinZOD, have you actually tried the command you suggest?

joseph@joseph-work:~$ grep -ci 'Pub:' united_kingdom_Eating_Drinking.gpx
20742

Which is c.38% of UK pubs, or the numbers I originally posted.

Thanks for contributing, but I would recommend you try the commands you suggest before telling me I'm doing it wrong. For another view, you could also look at the shapefile I link to from my latest blog post.

Cheers, Joseph

Looks awesome :)

I've done a lot of tracing in that part of the world too!

Cheers, Joseph

There used to be laws against GPS use in Egypt, but those have been lifted. Some parts of the country are very well covered by OSM (Cairo, for example), but there is a lot more that can be done.

I'd be really pleased to see some more Egypt mappers :)

Cheers, Joseph

And some of these areas, as I'm sure you'll have seen, cover a lot of the Earth outside the area you're interested in...